Google chips at Amazon's Glacier with Cloud Storage Nearline

All your data in 3 seconds for a cent per GB per month

Google wants to take a chunk out of Amazon's Glacier storage business with a cloud-based archive service that can start retrieving data in three seconds.

The Google Cloud Storage Nearline service, now in beta, charges one cent per GB per month for data at rest.

"Many of you operate a tiered data storage and archival process, in which data moves from expensive online storage to offline cold storage," said product manager Avtandil Garakanidze.

"We know the value of having access to all of your data on demand, so Nearline enables you to easily backup and store limitless amounts of data at a very low cost and access it at any time in a matter of seconds."

The secret sauce behind the service, he explained, is that it uses the same bucket and object storage operations as the rest of Google's cloud storage, which cuts costs and development work for the web ad giant. Data is stored in multiple locations for faster access and there are OAuth and granular access controls on transfers.

"You should expect 4 MB/s of throughput per TB of data stored as Nearline Storage. This throughput scales linearly with increased storage consumption," the documentation states. "For example, storing 3 TB of data would guarantee 12 MB/s of throughput, while storing 100 TB of data would provide users with 400 MB/s of throughput."

Google has also partnered with Iron Mountain, NetApp, Geminare, and Symantec/Veritas to sell the new service into enterprises, and is looking to expand its channel network quickly. That's bad news for Amazon Web Services' Glacier service, which is melting in the face of rising heat in the storage sector.

Glacier costs about the same as Google's new service but data is stored offline. That means it can take a couple of hours to get hold of that file. Under the circumstances, most companies might find Google's new service tempting. ®